• 2 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 6th, 2023






  • Thank you so much, this is very helpful information! What kind of features am I missing out on using it locally? Setting and measuring the temperature sounds to me like a pretty feature-complete thermostat. :) To clarify, I don’t actually need any Apple hardware/software to use this, Home Assistant just pretends to be HomeKit connecting to the Tado USB bridge and provides free control from its interface?


Hi! I hope this post is on-topic enough. I’ve just moved into a flat in Germany and its thermostat has an incredibly loud clock ticking every second. My landlord allows me to replace it, so I looked for options and learned it uses a proprietary interface (Vaillant 7-8-9) and my only real option is from the brand Tado. I e-mailed them and confirmed their V3+ wired model is compatible… but costs 220€; way above my budget. However, if I set the site to Germany the price drops to 100€.

Before spending so much on a device (100€ is still a lot!), I’d love to check whether I can use it with Home Assistant. I recently installed it on a spare SBC and got the zbdongle-e working, ready to start connecting things. I found (cw: AI image) this blog post that says it works by having HA emulate Apple’s HomeKit, does this mean it should work fine, regardless of the zbdongle-e? Should I be aware of any caveats to this approach, or to the Tado thermostat itself?

Thanks :)







  • I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can’t recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it’s a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction… I’ve only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it (“infect”) to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects… if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it’ll work forever and anywhere.






  • I currently host Navidrome, which has an okay web player. On Android I use “Tempo” (though it is unmaintained) to connect to it, and on Linux I use Tauon (though it has very poor playback). I could not find a native Linux client that is not buggy unfortunately, so I’m also on the lookout for better solutions! I’m not familiar with the device you are talking about but every client I tried supports MPRIS, which are the regular media controls that can be used via the playerctl command, so you should be able to hook things up that way.



  • Thanks. I’ve successfully “upstreamed” some of my patches to some courses, but sadly still most of the education is Visual Studio-based. It’s good to see more people in the new years contacting me after asking teachers about Linux and being given my name for help, but of course I want this to be a base part of the curriculum!